


Ghost Stories

by rolameny



Series: Destiny fics [1]
Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2018-12-21 10:45:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11942487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rolameny/pseuds/rolameny
Summary: Who are you, in your second incarnation? Who are you, Guardian, full of Light?





	Ghost Stories

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in July, well before my Destiny Week fills, and was my first character exploration of my Warlock. 
> 
> It is maybe now obvious that I really like 1) worldbuilding 2) transferring game mechanics into prose 3) thinking out loud.

They call her many things: Shaxx especially. When he sees her he laughs in that way of his and calls out: _Oryx-slayer! The Crucible misses you, Hivebane!_ Shaxx is mighty. His enthusiasm is mightier.

Many call her _Guardian,_ around the tower: the hangar workers, each with their own attitude; the frames briskly in their way, according to protocol. Eris Morn reaches for her, and though she never touches her sleeve, her tone is grasping: _Guardian,_ she says. _Tell me what you saw, under Luna. I need to know._

Zavala and Ikora call her _Guardian_ with that same nod of the head, the same earned respect. A measured tone. Cayde-6 sees her, and slings a heavy arm around her shoulders. _Hey, Guardian,_ he says, _my buddy, my pal, my number one mentee – strictly between us and our Ghosts: I need a favour._

Her Ghost – her Ghost doesn't differ much from them, except in the essential: he says _my Guardian_. She is his Guardian; he her Ghost. When the others are only a voice in her ear, fading on the descent into Hive-pits, Cabal-bunkers at the edge of the heliosphere, they have these titles they have granted to each other: mutual ownership.

The Exo she doesn’t know called her Ghost _Little Light_ : he resented it, as condescending, and she resented it, because he wasn’t the Exo’s to name.

The Fallen call her _Thief_ ; they call her _Taker, Bitter-gifted-with-that-which-was-ours_. The Cabal call her _Guardian_ too, though she thinks the nuance is different in their language, something closer to _Warden_.

She doesn’t call herself much of anything, in her own head. Her Ghost asked her, when he woke her up, when he spun her a body from Light in that tired highway junkyard. She’d had to think about it.

Eventually, in a broken-roofed room of the Cosmodrome, open to the sky, Fallen at her feet and rifle cooling in her hands, she’d told him: _Call me Rust_. It was good a name as any. It was nearly all she’d seen in her first moments: her Ghost, the cars and curving wall and broken rebar all rusting to orange, that clean blue above them.

 _Rust, then. C'mon!_ he’d said, and undid her neurons and organelles to knit her back together thirty feet up, in the cockpit of a jumpship that Amanda Holliday told her, later, tapping that wrench of hers against the base of a projected holo diagram, that was mostly held together with, _well: rust._

* * *

Rust doesn’t know anything about the person she was before she was Rust. There are inferences she can make, base assumptions: she’s Awoken. Woken again in the Cosmodrome, in Old Russia – so she, or her near ancestors, ran from Earth, and earned the lightning that ripples in the corner of her jaw and the skin between her fingers. She, or her ancestors, returned to their first birthplace. Maybe they crashed, shot out of the sky. Maybe she lived and worked there for a time before Fallen or human or Guardian killed her; maybe she met her death innocent, in workplace accident. Maybe she had numbered among the Reef Awoken then, and was sent to Earth a spy or warrior. The Reef doesn’t recognize her as one of theirs now, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Little does.

Her hair was clipped when she woke up again, for this, her second or third lifetime. A pattern of dots across her cheekbones and chin, a sort of veil, the ink scarred deep enough under her skin to wake up with her. Whoever Rust-before-Rust had been, they had chosen that, or had it chosen for them.

She asked her Ghost, once, about her clothes, any equipment – what he had seen when he found her. _Sorry,_ he said, regretful – corners drooping around his eye. There had been nothing much to see other than a few half-buried curves of bone, and then the Light had burned away everything, down to her DNA.

There were some Guardians who let the question consume them. There were others who never thought about it at all, or claimed not to.

Guardians tended to be quiet alone, pent-up energy from lonely patrols breaking out into sudden rowdiness in groups. There were differences, disagreements, sometimes violent ones, but she had never met a Guardian who was temperamentally unsuited for the work.

She knew one Guardian, found by his Ghost on Venus, who hadn’t been dead long enough for his possessions to rot in the swamp air. There was an ID tag in a briefcase near his body, with a picture. Records were scattered, but he’d managed to find a branch of the family he’d belonged to before he was a Guardian. He brought them to the city under the shadow of the Tower. He visited them sometimes, and the children called him Uncle. He’d found them over eighty years ago, and they still called him Uncle in that corner of the city, and sent him back up to his war with a handful of fresh eggs. Rust had heard from Dart-11, who overheard Sunna gossiping with Cix in a Crucible arena between rounds, who knew Ell in the city who swapped labour with the family sometimes, that one of the youngest had said _Great-gramma says she only met him a few times before but he’s way nicer now that he’s_ died _!,_ and then fallen into nervous giggles at repeating an adult’s disrespect.

She had watched that Guardian carefully for a time, whenever their paths crossed. He’d seemed no more and no less functional than other Guardians, trustworthy in a firefight like any other near-stranger beaten into shape by Shaxx and his frames. He was just sometimes seen, on coming back to the Tower from its city below, to take an egg out of a pocket and look at it with an expression her Ghost had categorized as _bemused_. He traded them at the cafeteria on the lower level for jerky, mostly.

She’d asked her Ghost once, tucked into a sandstone crevice and watching Cabal troop movements in the twilight, _Is our lack of context, our lack of memories, on purpose? Does the Traveler think we’d lose effectiveness if we knew where we came from? Or is it just another unintentional side effect we turn into stories about ourselves?_

Her Ghost had spun into physical being then, flickering blue against her shoulder. _I don’t know,_ he’d said, and the slow roll of his body around his still core meant _thoughtful._ _I don’t know much other than what I had to know to find you and wake you up, and you especially didn’t have much to go on. The Exo Guardians generally learn a bit more about who they were, but most of them don’t really seem happy about it._

Rust had nodded. She sat with Banshee-44 sometimes, guns disassembled on an empty Häkke ammo crate behind his table, and she heard his mutters.

 _I don’t know that there’s an answer we_ can _find, and I’m not about to start doubting the Traveler,_ she had volunteered, _but it’s something to think about._

 _The last time you said that you learned how to pull an entire weather system down on someone’s head, Warlock,_ her Ghost said, but fondly.

She had laughed then, a silent huff, and leaned back to her scope.

Later, in their ship, intel sent on its sublight way ahead of them, she says, _I might ask around the other Warlocks for any research or theory. Ikora probably knows something._

Her Ghost sits nestled in her broad collar, poking his corners against her neck. _It’s a puzzle,_ she says. _It might mean something. Most puzzles do. And what I do is solve puzzles, or at least pick them apart for a handful of interesting shapes._

Her Ghost’s eye light up the patterns in her skin, blue on blue on blue. His edges dig into her skin, but he’s a warm, friendly weight, out here past the Sun where everything else is floating and cold.

 _And we are as the Traveler made us,_ her Ghost says.


End file.
